


Ice

by shadoedseptmbr



Series: Kirkwall Year One [1]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Assassin - Freeform, Gen, Knives, Poison, gambling debts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 04:29:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4465469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadoedseptmbr/pseuds/shadoedseptmbr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gamlen has debts.  Hawke clears them up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ice

**Author's Note:**

> from atomicpen's 100 days writing challenge on tumblr, prompt: Ice

Gamlen couldn’t move. He felt like he was at a pantomime, watching the whole unfold on a lit stage before him. As if puppets were having their strings cut. As if the bright daggers flashing were nothing more than sewing shears.

Puppets, he expected, bled a bit less. 

\----0000----

It had all sounded a bit cleaner when his niece had offered to arrange something to help him get the money-lenders off of his back. After all, it was her fault they were bothering him. It's not like he could spend a decent evening at home now and you had to play to keep up a tab in the taverns and Rose. 

He liked his niece, as much as he liked anyone. A strange girl; quiet with a cold sort of humor. But she left him alone, didn’t begrudge him a bit of coin for the brothel. Always brought him a bottle or two, if she came across them in her travels. 

She’d set up this meeting at this dingy dark tavern, in a pirate’s bolthole a few miles east of Kirkwall on the Wounded Coast.

“Where’d you get the coin for this?” he asked.

She winked a pale grey eye (and Maker, he _hated_ that she had his mother’s eyes, though in fairness his mother’s had been sweet and not bone chilling) and said, “Owner owes me a favor. He’s leant it to me for the salvage.”

“Salvage?”

“You’ll see, Uncle.”

Hawke had poured the drinks for seven men, merry as any serving maid he’d ever met. She _giggled_ , promising Terce that the payment would be on the table, soon as she got them all served.

Gamlen hadn’t really cared for the way a couple of the guards had ogled her arse, even in those leathers. She was Leandra's girl after all...

He was still pondering whether or not he should say something when the guards, one then the other, toppled over; foam and bile spilling from their mouths as they clawed at their throats. The gurgling noises turning into howling whines.

Jaxon pulled his sword before whatever was in the ale got him, mouth gaping as he staggered towards her and she pushed him over with a sharp little smile. 

Oh, Terce fought back. Big man and maybe there wasn’t enough poison to kill him, he landed a blow across her cheek that seemed to rattle her before she flipped away, landing with a stagger. But she smiled still, as blood trickled down her split brow and curved the sharp bones of her cheek. Terce plucked at a tiny sharp lodged in his throat with fingers that looked to be stiffening by the second before he dropped, his face a nasty shade of puce from whatever she laced her knives with. 

And then it was over and she was cleaning her blades on Matew’s tunic, grumbling a little over a notch in the metal from Terce's attempt to defend himself. She noticed Gamlen finally, still sitting at the table, tumbler of rotgut somehow still in his hand despite the fact that he’d lost most of the feeling below his neck. 

Well, he was gaping like yesterday’s flounder, hard not to notice. She shot him a flirty, toothy grin and it was all he could do not to whimper and cower before she started going through their pockets. A few minutes later, she sniffed. “Don’t mind helping you out, Uncle, but your boys don’t have enough on ‘em to cover the cost of my traps and poison, much less this dagger. Not polishing that out.” She stowed it in her belt, with a sigh. “Expected better if they were putting enough pressure on you to make you shake down Mother.”

She patted him on the shoulder as she prowled out of the room. “Don’t care if you gamble and drink and whore, Uncle. You’ll get rent. Once we pay off that debt, you’ll get a cut of what's left, too. But don’t go crying to her about it anymore, right? Come to me, if you have anymore…” she spun on her heel and cast her pale eyes around the gore-spattered ruin of a room, “problems. S'been fun. See you at breakfast, I'm sure.”

And with that, Hawke slipped into the shadows outside the door as if she was no more substantial than the smoke rising off the cheap tallow rushes. 

Gamlen staggered home, the scent of blood harsh in his nostrils. The last gurgling breaths of his gambling buddies rattling in his ears. 

He’d seen death, plenty of it. Kirkwall wasn’t a pleasure spot, not even up in Hightown. He’d caused it, twice. 

The wampus stick hanging on his wall, legacy of a gentleman’s sport, had once crushed in a boy’s skull. And though it was an accident, he’d never wanted to play again. Then there was the time he’d tried to pay off a debt, a couple of years before he’d sold his nieces off to pay theirs. He hadn’t been very good at it. Meeran had been agreed that Gamlen’s services wouldn’t be needed again. But he’d done it.

He’d say it was her Hawke blood, that it ran hot, but no…Amells were hot-blooded, heat of the moment types. He couldn’t turn down a dare or a bet. Leandra hadn’t been able to resist the lure of adventure.

Hawkes, though.

Hawkes knew how to run ice cold. 

He locked his door the next morning before she strolled home in the grey dawn.


End file.
